Comparison as Conclusion in the Case of Mircea Eliade

Drawing the Theorists' Eye:
Comparison as Conclusion in the Case of Mircea Eliade
Bryan Rennie, Department of Religion, History, Philosophy, and Classics
Westminster College, New Wilmington, PA 16172-0001
[email protected]
Zähriä Stäncu asked as early as 1955 why Eliade did not
publish or even record in his journal any commentary on the
"odious mass crimes of Sima's Legionaries" in the Romania of
the 1930s and 40s and in 1 982 Ivan Strenski began what soon
became a trend: critiquing Eliade's theoretical analyses by
reference to his political position. Indeed, Strenski argued that
that the traditionalist and mythico-religious feelings of the Ro-
VOLUME 36 NUMBER 3 / SEPTEMBER 2007
manian right actually produced Eliade's ontological and religious viewpoint. Following Strenski's criticism Adriana Berger
shifted her earlier appreciative analysis of Eliade's "desire for
unity" to a concerted attack upon his politics and his past. This
attack was reinforced in 1991 by Norman Manea's review
essay of Eliade's Journal and Autobiography, "Happy Guilt:
Mircea Eliade, Fascism and the Unhappy Fate of Romania."
BULLETIN / CSSR 75
Manea spoke of "the fact of Eliade's nationalist affiliation, its
magnitude and its durability" and insisted that "during
the years of his connection with the Romanian fascist movement ... Eliade always avoided a clear analysis of his militancy" (36). Later, in a review of the journal of Eliade's Jewish
onetime friend, Mihail Sebastian, Manea details their estrangement because of Eliade's politics and his "involvement
with the anti-Semitic Vremea," a weekly newspaper (1998,
38, and see 2003, 120).
At about the same time Leon Volovici published Nationalist Ideology and Anti-Semitism, The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 30s, which gave extensive coverage to the case
of Mircea Eliade. However, probably the most virulent attack
on the influence of right wing politics on Eliade's understanding of religion came in 1993 from the French scholar, Daniel
Dubuisson. I responded in some detail to Strenski, Berger,
Volovici, and Dubuisson in chapter 13 of my Reconstructing
Eliade (1996). Shortly after this, Russell McCutcheon argued
that the kind of scholarship of which Eliade was the chief
exemplar falsely claimed to be "apolitical." It thus produced a
"study of religion ... isolated from issues of power and privilege," which, among other evils, allowed Eliade to avoid responsibility for his own nationalist past and to gain power and
privilege in his discipline (1997, 179). Add to this the work of
Steven Wasserstrom on Eliade's correspondence with selfstyled superfascist, Julius Evola (1999, 49, 89, 101) and one
has a considerable body of material proposing a very negative
evaluation of Eliade's political position. However, the case is
far from closed. The detailed responses of Mac Linscott Ricketts (2003) must be taken into account, and the defense of
Eliade mounted by Francis Ion Dworschak (2004) is also wellworth considering. Florin Turcanu's Mircea Eliade: Prisonnier
de l'Histoire (2003) paints a more complex and nuanced picture of Eliade's life and times. Recent conferences in Bucharest in September 2006 and in Chicago in November of the
same year show Eliade in a much more complex light. The
scholars attending the conference at the Martin Marty Center
in the University of Chicago's Divinity School represented the
whole spectrum of analyses of Eliade. They included Daniel
Dubuisson, Steven Wasserstrom, the extremely knowledgeable Romanian Jewish scholar Moshe Idei, as well as Matei
Calinescu, Antoine Faivre, Carlo Ginzburg, J. Z. Smith, Bryan
Rennie, and Florin Turcanu. The proceedings of this conference are soon to appear in a volume from Oxford University
Press (Doniger and Wedermeyer, forthcoming). The general
conclusion of both these conferences was that the more extreme positions which have been taken on Eliade are probably
mistaken. Both his politics and his personality were complex
and overly-simple accusations (and exonerations) appear unwarranted. The younger scholars who are currently graduate
students at the University of Chicago seemed to represent a
tendency to return to the Eliadean corpus with renewed appreciation and an unbiased eye, although not without caution.
Nonetheless, the comparisons made in the earlier, more
critical literature were numerous and are still instructive. Adriana Berger, in her former period of sympathy for Eliade compared him with Henri Corbin as scholars who "revived a positive notion of the imagination" (1986, 141). Later, however,
Berger compared Eliade to Kurt Waldheim, Herbert von Karajan, Martin Heidegger, and Paul de Man. Ansgar Paus and
Russell McCutcheon both compared Eliade to Rudoph Otto,
76 BULLETIN / CSSR
to elucidate their understanding of Eliade's "sacred" via Otto's
Das Heilige. In sharp distinction to this William Paden argued
that Eliade's idea of the sacred is more closely comparable to
le sacré of Emile Durkheim (1994). McCutcheon has also
compared Eliade to Heidegger and de Man, although not
without qualifications. He says, "I see the links between the
Eliade, de Man, and Heidegger affairs not in terms of any
similarity in their individual actions, beliefs, or guilt... rather,
the links pertain to the techniques their contemporary defenders use not only to protect their work and influence in academia but to construct and maintain a supposedly ahistorical,
totalized scholarly field" (2002, 43). Norman Manea, on the
contrary, has written repeatedly and insistently on Eliade's
culpability as an anti-Semite and supporter of the fascist Iron
Guard, and he compares Eliade to Nae lonescu, Constantin
Noica, and Emil Cioran without any qualifications. Leon Volovici makes these same comparisons and adds various other
names to the list: Robert Brasillach in France, Nicolae Ro§u
and Nichifor Crainic in Romania. All of these men voiced
explicit and enthusiastic support for Nazi and fascist regimes,
and even though Volovici recognizes that, unlike them, Eliade
"avoided declaring his sympathy with Nazism in public"
(1991,131,135), Eliade is nonetheless counted amongst their
number. Volovici admits in his conclusion that Eliade's "case"
is "more complicated" (191). Nonetheless his comparisons
stand. Steven Wasserstrom concluded his comparison of
Eliade and Evola conclusively to prove Julius Evola's substantive closeness with Eliade (1999, and see Rennie, 2003).
I have argued elsewhere that "[¡Interpreting Eliade has become a microcosm of the History of Religions itself" (1996,
1-2). Continuing this comparison of the study of Eliade to the
study of religion, I would like to consider briefly some questions about comparativism in Religious Studies before considering its particular application in Eliade's case. In a paper on
comparativism Wendy Doniger pointed out that the essence
of prejudice can be seen as "the assumption that an unknown
individual has all the characteristics of the group to which he
or she belongs" (1996, 539). This type of prejudice is at work
when Eliade is grouped with Cioran, Heidegger, or Evola.
Eliade's less obvious political affiliations are explained as resembling those of some figure whose position is more familiar
or more self-evident and he is assumed to have all of the
characteristics of a class in which he can be included for other
reasons.
In a useful article on comparative studies, Fitz John PorterPoole has pointed out that "[t]he comparability of phenomena
always depends both on the purpose of comparison and on a
theoretically informed analysis" (1986, 414-15) and that
"various constructions and mappings tend to set different perspectives and to serve different analytical purposes by emphasizing varied aspects of the concept or domain" (432). In presenting a methodological framework for comparative study
and applying Bertrand Russell's theory of logical types to comparison, Jeffrey Carter indicated that "[a]ny comparative study
of religion is faced with a problematic contest between the
concern for particularity ... and a desire for generality ... a
sound comparative study somehow negotiates this contest
and accommodates both" (1998, 133). This accommodation
is, according to Carter, accomplished by "balancing and integrating two distinguishable forms of comparison," the "descriptive" and the "explanatory" (133-4).
VOLUME 36 NUMBER 3 / SEPTEMBER 2007
Carter argues that both description and explanation are
inherently comparative endeavors (135, 137) and he distinguishes them through Russell's observation that "a class and
its members exist at different levels of mathematical or logical
abstraction" (139f.) and are thus of different logical types. I do
not entirely agree with Carter's analysis here. He argues that
this distinction of logical types and of levels of generality and
abstraction alone distinguishes description and explanation. I
believe that this fails to take sufficient account of a distinction
often made in the philosophy of science that explanations are
answers to "why?" questions, whereas descriptions answer
"what?" questions. Thus part of what distinguishes them is the
type of questions they seek to answer. However, that said, the
balance of Carter's analysis is useful and adequate to my purpose. (Carter 2004 is an introduction to a volume of Method
and Theory in the Study of Religion that is a collection of
seven essays on comparative studies in religion focusing on
Patton and Ray, 2000. The journal, Numen, also devoted a
volume to the comparative study of religion, 48/3, 2001).
In the case of these comparisons of Eliade to other figures,
explanation is of a higher logical type. Description subsumes
the particular, the members of a class, the territory, and differences, whereas explanation subsumes the general, the
class, the map, and connections. "Higher logical types are
always contextual, necessarily intentional, and fundamentally
purposeful," says Carter (2004, 141). He argues that "historians of religion must clearly articulate the factors that influence
the character of these logical gaps in academic work.... One
such factor is the intellectual purpose behind conducting
scholarly work." Other such factors are audience, scale, and
theory (146).
In the paper already mentioned, Doniger considers "myths
about the problems that arise when someone regards two
different individuals in the dark as 'the same'"—the famous
night in which all cats or cows are black (1996, 531). Using
the image of microscopes and telescopes Doniger discusses
the range of focus that both myths and scholarly studies can
accommodate. Again, this is a spectrum reaching from the
particular to the general. At the "microscope end [says Doniger] ... we can see the myriad details" at the "telescope end
we can see the unifying themes" (544). Using an anecdote
from James Thurber in which the near-sighted Thurber discovers that he has drawn the reflection of his own eye in a microscope lens, Doniger warns against "the subjective nature of
what we see through the microscope" (544). She points out
that, in our consideration of individuals and details, "we are
always in danger of drawing our own eye, for we depict our
own vision of the world when we think we are depicting the
world" (545). Furthermore, she insists, "we choose a specific
level in order to make possible a specific task" (545). Thus, as
well as pointing out the dangers of an unrecognized subjectivity and self-description, she also agrees with Carter and
Porter-Poole that there is an irreducible intentional component to comparison: the authors of comparisons are making a
specific attempt to perform a pre-determined task—and at
least part of that task is to communicate their own vision.
In an extended discussion of "the new comparativism in the
study of religion" between William Paden, Marsha Hewitt,
Donald Wiebe, and E. Thomas Lawson (Method and Theory
in the Study of Religion, 8/1 [1996]: 1-35), Paden defended
the utility and benefit of properly conducted comparative
VOLUME 36 NUMBER 3 / SEPTEMBER 2007
studies. He accepted that "one of the most serious criticisms of
the old [specifically Eliadean] comparativisms was that they
obliterated local meanings and contexts" (1996, 8). Paden
points out that the "patterns" that make similarities evident in
the objects of comparison "are indeed chosen according to
the interests of the comparativists—whose eyes, ineluctably,
will be drawn to one set of data rather than another" (1996,
13). Thus Paden indicates both the tendency to a selfinterested agenda and the subjective nature of the vision of the
author of comparison. In her response to Paden, Marsha
Hewitt leans upon Jonathan Z. Smith's claim that otherness is
"preeminently a political category" (Smith 1985, 10) and advises her readers that "comparativism in the academic study of
religion must become self-conscious of its political nature,
that is, it is both a political and an academic activity ... it is
political because it harbors a dimension of power, which can
never be abolished." Although she continues, "it can be radically revised towards a consciously interrelational, intersubjective, and thus democratic relation between the theorist and
her/his chosen object of knowledge," she goes on,
one of the lessons to be drawn in critiques of 'the old
comparativism' [is that] it is possible to see the old
comparativism as a colonizing practice, in which the
preoccupations, preconceptions, and interests of thè
theorist become imposed on the object of study in ways
that forced it to fit the theory, in a process described
by Theodor Adorno as 'annexing the alien.' (Hewitt
1996, 17)
In his response, Thomas Lawson, even more forcefully than
Jeffrey Carter, insists that "comparison ... is basic to human
thought, and ... serves the purpose of advancing our knowledge ... [in fact] comparativism ... is an essential ingredient in
any approach that claims to advance our knowledge" (1996,
33, emphasis original). Thus "there has never been anything
wrong with the activity of comparing. For better or worse, we
do it all the time, and most of the time it serves our cognitive
purposes. [However,] the sophistication of the comparison
depends upon the productivity of the theory that supports it"
(34, 35). I agree with both Carter and Lawson here. Comparison is not only acceptable, it is unavoidable and potentially
beneficial. However, following the advice of all of the above
authors, we must attempt to be conscious of its purpose, investigate its end or aim, and beware of its tendency to subjectivity, self-description, and self-promotion. Since I agree
with this, I am not about to argue that there is anything wrong
in principle in comparing Eliade to other figures. However, I
remain convinced that the comparisons mentioned already
were unsophisticated and unselfcritical, and their concomitant theories are unproductive because they do not seek to
elucidate new descriptive information concerning their object
but to present a priori assumptions, which indeed are what
had drawn the theorist's eye to these comparisons in the first
place. I would argue that these comparisons come out of the
mold of the "old comparativism" and can be seen to commit
similar fallacies. As William Paden says in a later analysis,
comparative studies may be guilty of "appropriating Others' to
one's worldview and depriving them of their own voices ...
[and] can thus become a form of colonialist ideology" (2005,
217). These comparisons of Eliade sought to "annex" Eliade to
BULLETIN/CSSR 77
the agenda of the writers, to "colonize" and exploit his corpus.
In the guise of description, they misrepresent their logical
type. They are explanations, but they take little account of
specific contexts and often reveal no awareness of the effect of
their own political agendas in their argument. They commit
the fallacy of division by assuming that every member of a
class shares all the characteristics of the class, which, as Doniger indicated, is a form of prejudice. However, as Porter-Poole
pointed out, "[t]he lesson of Wittgenstein is simple but profound: there may be classes with members that share no single
feature in common" (1986, 427). Where Paden insists that
"the [new] comparativist understands that the compared phenomenon may be quite incomparable in other respects and for
other purposes" (1996, 9), these comparisons implied a continuity of similarity beyond the specific points of contact that
they established. They often failed to "include some statement
as to how the similar entities differ as well (Carter, 2004, 6).
Why did this happen? How were otherwise reliable scholars led to use such dubious methods? Porter-Poole realizes
that "cautiously but inevitably, I must go beyond the information that is locally presented." He continues, "[i]f I am to
converse about my analytic projects with other scholars of
religion, however, I must join with them in examining how,
and for what purposes we go beyond the immediacies of our
'texts'" (430). The purposes of these politically oriented comparisons of Eliade are in every case clearly to further the writers' own political ends. In most cases those ends are themselves quite admirable. Ansgar Paus and Russell McCutcheon
compare Eliade to Otto in order to further their reading of
Eliade's sacred as a theological construct and thus to oppose
the pernicious workings of concealed theology in a supposedly impartial academy (but Paden's alternative reading of
Eliade's sacred indicates a real possibility that their initial assumptions are misguided). McCutcheon's comparison of
Eliade to Heidegger and de Man, although couched in negative terms—like a politician starting a rumor by denying it—is
made to support his otherwise reasonable argument that no
scholar is apolitical. Norman Manea's comparisons of Eliade
to Nae lonescu, et al., like the comparisons made by both
Volovici and Wasserstrom, serve admirably to vilify the evils
of anti-Semitism and thereby all other such bigotry and prejudice. They appear nonetheless to be inaccurate.
Doniger points out that "in the discipline of the history of
religions, universalist comparative studies of the sort that Mircea Eliade once made so popular have been, by and large,
fired from the Western Canon" (1996, 532). It is ironic that I
seek to defend Eliade, the past master of the old comparativism, from comparison, but Doniger goes on to say that "the
modern comparative study of religion was in large part designed in the pious hope of teaching our own people that
'alien' religions were like 'ours' in many ways, so that we
would no longer hate and kill the followers of those religions ... this goal has yet to be fulfilled" (532). The intention
and purpose of the early comparative endeavor in the history
of religions also had an admirable motive (although admittedly this was only one of a complex of purposes, which also
unhappily involved orientalism and other strategies of domination). The point, however, is that admirable motives can
sometimes produce poor scholarship. We must always consider the purpose necessarily involved in explanatory comparisons, and these comparisons of Eliade can be seen as
78 BULLETIN / CSSR
sacrificing the elucidation of the text (Eliade's intention and
effect) to the advancement of their own ends.
Comparison is helpful, but it must be held to high standards
of accountability, no less in the comparison of individuals
than of traditions. These comparisons of Eliade tell us more
about the vision of the writers than they tell us about Eliade.
Just as Aurobindo said about commentaries on the Gita—they
tell us more about the commentators than about the Gita
(quoted in McDermott 1973,109). They give more insight into
the vision of the authors than into the nature of their object—
their authors indeed "drew their own eyes."
I agree with the many authors who have emphasized the
impossibility of perfect neutrality (e.g., D'Costa 1993, and
Porter-Poole 1986, 417-18, quoting Medawar 1969, 149). I
am not pleading for some inhuman and impossible objectivity
to govern all comparison, but rather for an informed, selfaware, and self-critical stance in which we recognize and
freely admit to the agendas that both drive us to make our
comparisons and enable the (ap)perception of the homologies
between the objects of our comparisons. (By apperception I
mean the phenomenon of perceiving the same thing differently based on different prior experiences. On this and particularly the role of religious symbols in its manipulation, see
my forthcoming article in Témenos). The darkness in which all
cats or cows are "the same" is the darkness of our own ignorance in which we conjure questionable similarities. What
draws our eyes are often our ends, and awareness of our ends
should encourage us to draw our eyes clearly. My end has
been to defend the thought of a past scholar in the field from
the effects of its own status. As a public artifact, Eliade's texts
are freely available for annexation for other writers' ends, and
are often misrepresented. I hope to encourage the awareness
that our perceptions of similarity are necessarily contextual
and often self-interested and that with this awareness will
come the recognition that in our difference lies our similarity.
We must not conjure artificial similarities to achieve even
admirable ends but must encourage an accurate perception of
actual differences.
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"The Incompatibilities: Romania, the Holocaust, and
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On the "Obvious" in Science and Religion:
Some Recent Flashpoints in the Media and the Academy
Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter, Department of Rhetoric, Communication & Journalism
Oakland University, 317 Wilson Hall, Rochester, Michigan 48309
[email protected]
Call me crazy but anytime I hear someone refer to something
ing
as "obvious," a yellow flag goes up. Call it the perpetual critic
itic
in me or, perhaps, the intellectual. When anything "obvious"
us"
(and I will drop off with the quotation marks now that I have
lve
your attention to that word) is mentioned in regard to science
ice
or religion—or both together—then red flags fly. Add to this
:his
that with the so-called obvious, there is usually one of two
wo
undesirables associated with its usage: a) sneering or b) ununabashed ignorance. Both have to do with arrogance, whether
her
smart or not. But don't get me wrong: I have been knownι to
cause red flags to be thrown by other people. Still, isn't there
ere
a sense of fatigue when it comes to, say, either the obvious
3US
conflict or obvious cooperation between science and religion?
Dn?
jt I
Some things may be plain as the nose on your face, but
essee it as my business—as I expect many of you do—to quesnly
tion much of what others take to be plain. Perhaps we not only
think about the obvious, we research it. And when the researcher or intellectual suggests that this or that in regardI to
to
religion is apparent for all to see, we wonder—unless it iss a
common sense point to us—whether he or she has really done
>ne
their homework. Moreover, I wonder if a basic philosophical
cal
or methodological point is realized by the intellectual/
ial/
researcher: for all one knows in any given field, minus some
me
specific subfields or specialties, there usually is more that one
)ne
does not know. This certainly may be debated. However, this
his
statement could be taken, too, as a basic (I take it to be as
close to obvious as one can get) epistemologica! truth that: is,
is,
on the one hand, indicated in classic philosophical literature
ure
by Socrates or, on the other, signaled by the starting point for
all inquiry, scientific or otherwise.
Much more could be said on the topic of the obviousι in
general, but now let me turn to some specific common sense
ise
ways of tackling the science and religion discussion today.
ay.
80 BULLETIN / CSSR
Much has been done, and I remain a novice in the vast literature to date, but let me mention a few of the most recent,
Aside from the science and religion discussion at-large, I became interested in a few books in particular over the last few
years for two reasons. First, they seem to promise a great deal
in the way of advance. This advance is understood to be
directly due to the authors' self-professed reliance on scientifie method and sensibility. Second, they are getting a great
deal of attention in the popular media. This attention brings to
mind the question of whether a wider discussion, and perhaps
study, of religion and science could take place. In particular,
approaching religion not only as within culture but, also,
within nature (so you have religion as culture as nature,
roughly speaking) is provocative. If approached this way, then
studies of religion could become a special field within scientifie studies.
Now one way I see religions—to employ some jargon—is
as complex communicative systems that rely upon both totalizing and discrete environments of information transaction. I
can't elaborate on this here, but in my preliminary research,
the person I have found that comes closest to this description
is Susan Blackmore (1999) in her discussion of "religions as
memeplexes." In short, Blackmore, following Peter Dawkins
(1976), proposes the analogy of "memetic" evolution in culture to genetic evolution in nature. Mêmes, like genes, are
information units, but unlike genes they transmit the building
blocks of human culture rather than biology. She might be
distinguished from Dawkins in that her understanding of
mêmes is that they take on a life of their own that is distinct or
even separate from natural evolutionary history. Her sense of
consciousness and culture, then, introduces what could be
taken as a kind of dualism or, if you like, dialectic. Her take is
distinctive because others, such as Daniel Dennett (2006a),
VOLUME 36 NUMBER 3 / SEPTEMBER 2007
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